1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a system, method, and program for filtering content from an incoming data stream being accessed by a viewer program using a neural network to inhibit access to material deemed unacceptable.
2. Description of the Related Art
Although the Internet is heralded as a revolutionary technology capable of empowering people by providing relatively easy access to a tremendous store house of information, it is also derided for allowing unrestricted access to material considered highly inappropriate for children, such as pornography, hate literature, and violence. Many lawmakers and various interest groups have called for government censorship of the Internet because of the availability of such controversial material. One other concern with the Internet has been the ability of children to engage in inappropriate communications with adults on IRC chat lines that not only exposes children to inappropriate material, but also facilitate inappropriate encounters between children and adults. Businesses that network their employee computers to the Internet are also concerned that employees spend time on non-business related Internet activity. Thus, businesses are also interested in controlling which Internet sites their employees may visit to prevent unproductive employee Internet access.
The response of the computer industry to these concerns has been the development of filtering software, such as Net Nanny by Net Nanny LTD., which is described in the “Net Nanny User Guide” (Copyright Net Nanny LTD., 1997). Such prior art filtering software is capable of monitoring Internet software, such as browsers, e-mail and IRC chat room applications and also other application programs, such as word processing and image viewing applications, e.g., Adobe Photoshop, Corel Photo-Paint, and Microsoft Paint. Current filtering software operates by providing a list of Internet sites and words that could be deemed inappropriate to children. To monitor Internet sites, the filtering software developer provides user lists of inappropriate web sites and other Internet sites, such as newsgroups and IRC chat lines, that its in-house researchers have located and deemed inappropriate for a particular age group of children. The purchaser of the filter program, which may be a parent, library, school, etc, may then set the filter software to deny access to all the Internet sites on the provided list.
The current techniques for identifying undesirable web sites rely on the filter developer to provide thorough research on web sites and timely updates. However, there are an immeasurable number of Internet web sites, many of which cannot be located through traditional search engines. Thus, researchers may miss numerous Web sites containing inappropriate material that are not accessible through traditional search techniques. Further, web sites are being added and removed all the time. Thus, a child would have access to inappropriate sites that are added to the Internet between updates of the list.
The prior art method for filtering documents is to scan the document for words on a “hit list” of unacceptable words, and deny access to those documents containing a word on the hit list. This prior art technique for identifying inappropriate documents may screen or deny access to numerous acceptable documents. For instance, if the word “breast” is on the list, then the filtering software would deny access to documents describing cooking recipes for chicken breast or for medical documents on such important issues as breast cancer. In fact, many have criticized the use of word based lists as a filtering tool because it often screens out much useful educational information. For instance, if a list included common hate terms or a discussion of hate groups by a civil rights or anti-hate group, then such filtering software could conceivably deny access to deemed appropriate anti-hate literature.
Businesses are often interested in limiting not only what employees cannot access, like the child filtering product, but also limiting what they can access. For this reason, businesses may use firewall software that would prevent their employees from accessing any Internet sites except those specifically sanctioned or on an approved list. However, such techniques may be problematic because the employee could be barred from readily accessing a work-related site that is not on the approved list, such as a site linked to or mentioned from a site on the approved list.
Thus, there is a need in the art for an improved technique for filtering Internet and computer readable material for inappropriate content, while at the same time providing flexibility to allow access to educational material that may otherwise include words or phrases that are often associated with inappropriate material.